Tear Asunder Your Illusions

 "Off The Wall" by Michael Jackson

...you can shout out all you want to / 'cause there ain't no sin in folks all gettin' loud / if you take a chance and do it / then they're ain't no one who's gonna put you down...


I took my braids out yesterday and washed it to reveal my natural little afro.  I was quite excited.  I can't really explain how I felt other than liberated.

I felt free of a lot of toxins, free of a lot of expectations, and free of a lot of nuisance.

I am sure that people will respond to me differently.  There is something considered to be intimidating or even haughty about natural haired women.  Women with natural hair are typically "conscious" and consciousness can sometimes connotate a haughtiness.

But I don't think haughtiness is accurate.  Something happens in you when realize how much the institutions of this civilizations lie to you, how impossible they try to make it for the common man, how they distract you so as not to allow you to notice the emptiness of this life and try to fight against it.  So you may be angered, irritated, underwhelmed with your life, frustrated with the blind people around you.  Maybe it is haughtiness.  Whatever.

Nonetheless, I felt electrified.  I know some people won't find me as attractive.  I know that certain type of men won't approach me (Hallelujah).  It's amazing, really.

I do feel a little self conscious.  I have lost the lustrous curly stands and other Caucasian knock off styles that people admired.  I miss the hair on my shoulders in some moments.  However, as I transition into this person who doesn't give a shit about what people think of her, who is doing it for Africa (everyday), who wants to let go of this materialistic, disillusioned, inauthentic, convoluted way of living to return to complex simplicity, who is preparing for daughters and the story of beauty I will be and teach them, I also gain confidence.  I'm happy to be natural and know what I know and to have realized what I have realized.

Lastly, it's just hair.  It is just a protein filament that grows out of our heads.  Civilization and culture happened and it became a way of expressing something, which is fine.  However, as usual, we have taken it too far.  It is a mode of expression but it is not our only mode of expression.


So Zainab, do what you do with this new do.  You are beautiful.


Zainab --> doing it for Africa since 1987.

Roll Up My Sleeves and Fight for You Girl

 "Backtight" by Jaheim

...ain’t nothing stopping me from getting backtight with you / go head and trip you got the right to / if I gotta roll up my sleeves and fight for you / i’ll stand outside in the rain all night for you

School is out.  The semester is over.  I took my last exam on Wednesday afternoon and it was a stellar performance, as usual.  I earned more B's that I would like but I did work hard most of the time.  I found it difficult to balance my extra-curricular activities, that arouse so much of my passion in helping to fix the world, and doing schoolwork.

I recognized that my academics were important, as I have been taught my whole life, but I am recognizing that my service to the community is much more important.  The issue, however, is that my academic work, achievement, and licensure will give me more tools to serve my community on a larger level than my current volunteering and action allow.

Therefore, I persevere.


I am so proud of myself.  I think that so much has occurred and so much growing took place.  I hate cliches and I hate to sound cliche, but...


I am quite different from who I was four months ago.  And it was only four months ago.


My family and I reconnecting, apologizing, spending time together, supporting each other definitely made a huge difference in my psyche.

It didn't cure anything, but it made it possible to bear some of the ills of my life and my mind.  My Mommy validated much I had been feeling and hypothesizing about the points of contention between us.  Because we never sat and discussed anything without arguing and attacking each other, we lost the details of the issue.

We argued about stupid and irrelevant things all to communicate our dissatisfaction with each other.  All we had to do was say we were dissatisfied, but communication has always been really difficult for us.


The war between the Dr. and Mrs. versus me is over and that has lifted such a heavy, heavy weight.


Then the beautiful Black womyn I met this semester and reconnecting with the beautiful Black womyn I already know was a nourishment like no other.


Afrikana Student Organization and OMSA's Womyn of Color Discussion group have been my church on campus and through it I met Charity.Velma.Ariel.Valerie.Brittany.Amanda and they have literally changed my life...they way my Christina.Brittany.Ravi.Gwenny did and continue to do.



Although age carries me closer and closer to the center of my "Africanness" (as Shahedah has dubbed it), spending time with people who are also being carried closer has made my carriage that much sweeter.  We all recognize answers in Africa.  Not that problems are not rampant, corruption is not real, poverty is fictional because all of those things exists...

But that Africa has resources...and we are a few.  And we want to encourage other Black people, all the people of the Diaspora to be resources for Africa, on the continent and off.


Thirdly, I started therapy.  Going to therapy is like putting on corrective glasses and seeing what you have been missing all along.  Taking what I learn in therapy seriously, improving my life by improving how I think of myself is like getting lasic surgery to improve my sight permanently.  I will do that.


And then I actually got glasses because I am near-sighted and have astigmatism in some eye...and I've been walking around missing all the details of the scene.


Lastly, I am working on my self-esteem.  It is hard to do because it is such an abstract concept that is developed without one's awareness.  How do you catch or gauge when you are growing up that [this], whatever it is that you are experiencing or enduring, will cause damage to your self-concept?  Self-esteem seems to develop in us, without us, informed by the people around us, most of whom are old enough to know the events of now nourish or deplete my self-esteem later.  But somehow, they overlook it too, and you are left, an adult, maybe self-loathing, and inept at thinking in any other way.


But I am working on it.  It sounds strange [mainly because I am strange], but I think of "self-esteem" as myself as a little girl.  When I am talking to myself, thinking to myself, I try to be careful what I say to myself by imagining that I am talking to a child.  I love children like I love God.  My service to the community will always be predicated on what I am leaving and providing for the children of the world, who don't ask to be born and are expected to assume all the pathologies of the world they are born into.


So I talk to [me] as (me - 17 years = selfesteem).  When I make a mistake or do something I am unhappy with, I reprimand myself appropriately, recognizing that the [little girl: self-esteem] wants to be a good person and is trying her best.  She is young and unwise, willing to learn, but always human and imperfect.  She lives, she learns, she does it better next time as long as it doesn't kill her this time.  And it usually doesn't.

Give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have NO time to criticize others.

 And I have to be willing to do that for myself too.

Undulating

My Mom apologized to me. She asked me to come over to their house, sat in the living room with my father and I, and apologized for being overly critical, for not loving me unconditionally, for expelling me when I got to difficult to handle, and not creating the home that every child deserves.

She said such poetic things like "No matter what happens in the world: what you go out and do or what is done to you, you should always have a place to come to, where you will be accepted."

This falls right in line with African style. There is no place to throw a child, no place to give away a child, no matter how "bad" they may be. She said she realized that she had not created a home for me just because she bought a nice house.

She said it all so poetically. She said everything I resented her for not realizing. She made congruent everything between her treatment of me and what our culture says to do that was previously congruent.

She showed me her emotions too. I always complain that she talks about me to her sisters, reveals her sadness or her frustration or her regret to them, but presents this stone cold, infallible persona to me.

And I try to explain that it would help if she showed me those emotions. It would humanize her. I always thought she was just heartless. I felt like she didn't even have feelings and that allowed me to be so hurtful to her. I wanted her to show me that she feels things. Instead, I would try to hurt her and she would hurt me worse.

And then she rebuked my Daddy, which I thought was funny because I had always suspected that I was a divisive issue in my parents' marriage but I had no proof.

Mom rebuked Dad for going behind her back and talking to me on the phone when they had decided that they, as a couple, as a unit, would not talk to me (I think it's funny that they had conversations, as parents, about not talking to one of their children...like I was too much to deal with so they were just going to stop talking to me).

Then, Daddy would fold and he would always call me. He has always been the one to break the silence that sometimes becomes our relationship.

This past summer, when there was some mix up about my tuition balance at the university, the university was sending letters to my permanent address: the parentals' house.

They flipped out and were trying to figure out what was going on and blah blah blah. Mom made a fight out of it when 1) it isn't any of her business because she doesn't subsidize my life in any capacity 2) I am perfectly capable of handling my own situations now. They cut me off financially and socially, I am sure in hopes to incapacitate me, force me to return home and do what they ask to regain their support.

I did not. I decided to do it on my own than live in this limbo of expulsion at any moment. My parents were constantly threatening me with removing their support. So I called their bluff and when they did, I didn't give up on my life. My friends wouldn't give up on my life and kept me afloat until I made it out of the flood altogether.

Then I started school this semester, meaning I obviously resolved the tuition situation (which I kept telling them not to worry about and I don't know why they were worried because they don't pay for anything for me and they didn't really offer to pay anything so why are you trippin?).

My Dad started calling me and checking on me and cracking jokes for me and laughing with me...and pretending that everything was fine.

Meanwhile, my Mom wasn't talking to me, which I still don't understand. I just told her not to worry. I just want her to be my mom. She doesn't need to worry about those things anymore.

So my mother told my father that she was upset that he would talk to me after they had decided that I was contraband. She said that it made her angry that he was somehow immune from the drama. Here he was, on the phone, laughing and bonding with me when she wanted to have a relationship with me too but was upset.

Even if she was being unreasonable, it made her look even worse. She said she wondered what I must have thought of her. If my Dad can talk to me and we can have a relationship despite our conflicts, then what is wrong with my Mom? Which is exactly what I would think!

My father never seemed any less frustrated, less disappointed, less angry with me than my Mom did but he was able to return to his role as father. He never made me "pay" for my behavior by withholding his love (even though at a point he was behaving just as unreasonably as her).

So I wondered why she was so obstinate, why she was so mad.

The things is, they are both people and the are different people. My Dad would continue communication just in case there was "a chance to save my daughter".

And it was a genius plan. If he hadn't have been talking to me, my mother wouldn't even have had the opportunity to call me and ask me to come over and talk, because I wouldn't have accepted their phone calls and I wouldn't have returned them either.

She was jealous. I thought that was so cute. But again, it was her sharing how she felt, which I have never been privy to. I literally thought that my mother just didn't like me. And relatives would say that such a thing was absurd. But even though she didn't say that she didn't like me, her anti-emotional stance, the way she would mock me when I became emotional, and the choice to punish me with silence rather than discuss issues made me think she didn't like me.

That was all I could use to explain it. I am 22 years old. The relationship I have with my parents at this age, given that I am financially independent, is completely optional. So I was always confused about the way she chose to handle her anger. She chose not to talk to me, which is painful of course, but is also stupid. Being estranged from my parents is not the devastating thing at 22 that is may be at 15 and 16.

But, we all have our burdens. Her burdens, her inadequacies, her idiosyncracies, her life experience guided her to act and treat me in a certain way, something very incongruent with what I expected and vice versa. I think we both operated under the premise that our relationship, as mother and daughter should just work. Neither of us considered (or showed the other) our humanity and the work it takes for any two human beings to have a healthy and functional interpersonal relationship.

I am going to forgive her just as I hope she will forgive me. And we will replace statements like "Ugh" with revolutionary cries.